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Monday, October 29, 2012

With no resources to protect it, Pakistan struggles with smuggled Buddhist relics

Pakistani
officials look at Buddha statues confiscated by custom authorities in
Karachi, Pakistan. Lacking the necessary cash and manpower, Pakistan is
struggling to stem the flow of millions of dollars in ancient Buddhist
artifacts that shadowy criminal gangs dig up from the country’s
northwest and smuggle to collectors around the world. AP Photo/B.K.
Shakil Adil. By: Sebastian Abbot and Zarar Khan, Associated Press
ISLAMABAD (AP).-

2012, The Associated Press
Lacking the necessary cash and manpower, Pakistan is struggling to
stem the flow of millions of dollars in ancient Buddhist artifacts that
looters dig up in the country’s northwest and smuggle to collectors
around the world.
The black market trade in smuggled antiquities is a global problem
that some experts estimate is worth billions of dollars per year. The
main targets are poor countries like Pakistan that possess a rich
cultural heritage but don’t have the resources to protect it.
The illicit excavations rob Pakistan of an important potential source
of tourism revenue, as valuable icons are spirited out of the country,
and destroy any chance for archaeologists to document the history of the
sites.
“We are facing a serious problem because Pakistan is a vast country,
and we have very meager resources,” said Fazal Dad Kakar, head of the
government’s department of archaeology and museums. “We have no manpower
to watch the hundreds of Buddhist sites and monasteries in the country,
most of which are located in isolated valleys.”
Many of the sites are in the Swat Valley, a verdant, mountainous area
in the northwest that was once part of Gandhara, an important Buddhist
kingdom that stretched across modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan more
than 1,000 years ago.
Police seized a large container filled with nearly 400 artifacts in
the southern port city of Karachi in July that were being trucked north
to be smuggled out of the country. About 40 percent were found to be
genuine, including nearly 100 Buddhist sculptures up to 1,800-years-old
worth millions of dollars, said Qasim Ali Qasim, director of archaeology
and museums in southern Sindh province.
There were effectively no restrictions on whisking Buddhist relics
out of Pakistan’s northwest in the first few decades after the country
achieved independence from Britain in 1947, said Malik Naveed, a former
police chief of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where the Swat Valley is
located.
That changed in 1975 when the government passed a set of laws
criminalizing the practice. But Kakar, the federal archaeology chief,
said the laws are difficult to enforce given a lack of funds, and people
who are caught rarely receive punishments severe enough to act as much
of a deterrent.
Police arrested several people connected to the seizure in Karachi in July, but they have yet to be formally charged.
Two men who were arrested last October for excavating a statue of
Buddha from a site in Swat were only fined about $50 each, far less than
the maximum punishment of a year in prison and a fine of more than $800
they could have received, said Syed Naeen, a public prosecutor in the
area.
A Manhattan art dealer, Subhash Kapoor, is under arrest in
neighboring India for allegedly smuggling millions of dollars in
antiquities out of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan that he sold to
museums and private collectors from his gallery in New York and online,
according to police investigators involved with the case.
Rather than dig up Buddhist relics, some Pakistanis have focused on
making replicas, such as the ones seized in Karachi, that they often try
to pass off as the real thing — although this practice is also illegal
in the country. Many operate covertly around the ancient Buddhist site
of Taxila, a short drive from the capital, Islamabad.
“I learned the practice from my fellow villagers in my childhood and
can fake anything using cement, small stones, some colors and
chemicals,” said Salahud Deen, who works out of his home in a village
near Taxila.
The 30-year-old high school dropout was contacted by The Associated
Press through the owner of a tea shop in the area and showed off a
sample of his wares, including a small statue of the Buddha’s head. He
said he recently received an order from a man in Sri Lanka to make a
3-foot tall “fasting Buddha” statue and expected to make a little more
than $200 in the process.
Locals who deal in real Buddhist artifacts they have stolen from
sites in the northwest likely make much more money, but it’s almost
nothing compared to what people higher up the food chain earn. Looters
receive on average less than 1 percent of the final sale price of an
item, while middlemen and dealers get the other 99 percent, according to
the former head of the U.N. Interregional Crime and Justice Research
Institute, Sandro Calvani.
Kakar, the federal archaeology chief, tried to stop Christie’s
auction house in New York from selling a “fasting Buddha” from the 3rd
or 4th century last year as well as dozens of other Buddhist relics he
claimed were smuggled out of Pakistan illegally.
Christie’s went ahead and sold the Buddha for nearly $4.5 million and
has asked Pakistan to provide proof of its claims, the auction house
said.
Kakar was more successful with two shipments of Buddhist artifacts
from Dubai and Tokyo that were seized by U.S. customs authorities in
2005, he said. He was able to prove the sculptures came from Pakistan by
analyzing the age and composition of the stone, and the U.S. returned
them, said Kakar.
Neil Brodie, an expert on the illicit trade in antiquities at the
University of Glasgow, said it was critical for authorities to put
pressure on private collectors and museums whose demand for ancient
relics is fueling the black market. Some museums, particularly in Italy
and Britain, have become more diligent about avoiding antiquities with
questionable histories, but those in the U.S. have much more work to do,
he said. “You are losing the archaeological record on the ground by the
destruction that is entailed by digging these relics out,” said Brodie.___ Associated Press writers Sherin Zada in Mingora, Pakistan,
Adil Jawad in Karachi, Pakistan, and Ashok Sharma in Chennai, India,
contributed to this reportsource :Buddhist art news